Scanlan: MacLean reminded hockey can be humbling

The reigning NHL coach of the year was willing, available, sitting by his phone.

He let us know, in case the Canadian hockey lords needed a nudge.

Alas, the call to serve his country at the world hockey championships did not come.

When it rains it pours. Paul MacLean knows this as well as anyone. It’s been raining a lot in his world. Of all the Senators in desperate need of a bounce-back season in 2014-15, MacLean might be on top of the list.

Such a fickle business, professional sport. Less than a year ago, he could do no wrong. His Senators team was banged up, star-depleted with injuries, and nevertheless battled their way, under MacLean’s guidance, to the seventh seed in the Eastern Conference, whereupon they put a playoff thumping on an Original Six team for the first time in the Senators modern history. Ottawa beat the mighty Montreal Canadiens, ranked second in the east, in a five-game series.

Adding sweet pleasure to Senators fans were the sights and sounds of MacLean verbally toying with the Canadiens as series emotions escalated. MacLean acted as though he’d been born at a playoff microphone. When Montreal winger Brandon Prust referred to MacLean as a “bug-eyed, fat walrus,” MacLean deflected the schoolyard chirp with his typical down-east humour.

“Bug-eyed? That’s a new one,” MacLean said.

“Walrus? Well, that’s too easy,” he added, twitching his mop of a mustache.

“But I’ll tell you one thing, I am not fat. I might be husky, but I’m not fat. So, I took offense to that.”

Whatever his physical description, MacLean was large and in charge. On a roll.

In a poll of NHL broadcasters at the end of the 2012-13 regular season, MacLean won the Jack Adams Award. The previous year, in his rookie season as an NHL head coach, he was third in the Jack Adams balloting after leading the rebuilding Senators to a playoff position in 2012, eighth in the east.

Last June, MacLean was justifiably rewarded by Senators management with a three-year contract extension.

Now? The former Winnipeg Jets bruising scorer has taken some lumps. When he makes jokes, they involve the Jack Adams “curse.” It’s as though he has all the status and security of a coach on the last year of a deal presiding over a last-place team.

Getting passed over by Canada’s world hockey group is merely the latest slight for MacLean, not that he was a frontrunner. Hockey Canada, which loves to tap familiar trees, announced that Dave Tippett, the Phoenix Coyotes head coach, will be the bench boss at the 2014 worlds in Belarus. He will be assisted by New Jersey Devils head coach Peter DeBoer, once a candidate to the coach the Senators, and Jets head coach Paul Maurice.

The staff was announced a day or so after MacLean received a dressing down from his bosses in Ottawa, although he had to be grateful in one sense. It could have been worse.

There was a feeling MacLean was on the verge of being fired for directing the Senators to an 11th place finish in the east, had his team not finished with a flourish – winning its final five games of the season. This was a tough season to swallow, but at least there was the after-dinner mint of beating the rival Toronto Maple Leafs on the penultimate night of the schedule, Ottawa nudging past the Leafs in the standings.

That might have spared MacLean from a firing, but not from having his knuckles rapped, or from feeling the presence of large, dark shadows. On a conference call with Ottawa media explaining how his club missed the playoffs, Senators owner Eugene Melnyk announced MacLean’s return for next season while including, “it does start at the coaching level. I just think he had a bad year. He readily admits that.”

This was shortly before general manager Bryan Murray, in his media conference, was asked a question related to MacLean’s admission that he became “a little more demanding” in his third season behind the bench.

“The players like the old Paul,” MacLean said. “They liked the guy that sat and talked to them and treated them in a more easygoing fashion – that talked, not confronted.”

Aren’t you glad your performance reviews don’t go public?

Interestingly, Murray also mentioned he wanted a “harder forward,” if he could add one to a team he wants to be tougher to play against. Hmm. Tougher team, gentler coach. That’s not far off Murray’s own philosophy as a coach. He stressed communication with his players, giving them all a role they could relish.

It will be interesting to see how MacLean and his team rebound next fall from the fallout of 2013-14, the final bits and pieces of which have not yet landed.

MacLean’s leash as head coach has been shortened, and a poor start could be lethal, but he needs enough slack to roam the room. He needs to have a voice.